UCSD-TV creators had big dreams for small screen

Station celebrates 20 years of growth and innovation

Alison Gang, Special to the U-T
05:45p.m. Oct 25, 2013

It’s been 20 years since UCSD-TV transmitted its first television signal from an antenna atop La Jolla’s Mount Soledad. While its broadcast signal was low-power, UC San Diego’s noncommercial television station — the first and only such channel in the University of California system — had lofty ambitions.

Just ask Mary Walshok, the station’s general manager and UC San Diego Extension dean, who made it her mission to share the intellectual life of a public research university with the actual public through the medium of television. Two decades later, with two TV channels and websites sharing content from throughout the University of California with viewers and web surfers around the world, it’s clear she’s accomplished far more than anyone could’ve envisioned back in 1993.

UCSD-TV

What it is: Founded in 1993, UCSD-TV is the non-commercial TV station and website operated by UC San Diego. It’s also home to UCTV, the channel for the entire University of California system.

Where to watch: Time Warner and Cox Ch. 135, AT&T Ch. 99, UHF (no cable) Ch. 35, Live stream and on-demand video at ucsd.tv and uctv.tv. Visit ucsd.tv/20th to browse the most popular programs in UCSD-TV’s 20 years, award-winners, and producers’ picks.

Walshok knew that if the university had one thing going for it in this daunting endeavor, it was quality content — even if limited funding meant it would need to be delivered in less flashy formats like lectures, studio interviews or panel discussions.

“We wanted to use this mechanism to share with the broader public all of the exciting and innovative things happening in music, science, medicine,” Walshok said in a recent interview. “You can build from this very strong base, and there is an enormous appetite for good conversation.”

Much to her delight, Walshok found others in the community who agreed. “We discovered both on campus and off campus that there were organizations and institutions that wanted to have a video and broadcast presence, but couldn’t cover the cost of highly produced programming like documentaries,” Walshok stated, citing early programming partners like City Club’s George Mitrovich, San Diego Opera’s Ian Campbell, Jack O’Brien from the Old Globe Theatre and, of course, campus partners like the School of Medicine, the School of Engineering and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “They all had extremely valuable material to share with a much broader audience.”

But first, Walshok had to recruit the talent to make her vision a reality. It just so happened that a trio of qualified UC San Diego alumni, who had built their media careers in bigger, more bustling cities, were eager to return to sunny San Diego — and getting UCSD-TV off the ground was just the excuse they were looking for.

Public affairs producer Shannon Bradley was the first to sign on. After working as a producer for PBS’ “The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour,” Bradley admits she was a little shocked when she first arrived on campus to find there wasn’t even a TV studio yet. “We had to build the control room ourselves,” Bradley mused. “They teased me for using a power drill for the first and only time in my life.”

What started out as a six-month contract became a 20-year career (and counting), producing everything from talk shows about local and national elections to thoughtful documentaries covering urban planning in San Diego and the complexities of life on the U.S.-Mexico border.

Managing director Lynn Burnstan was the next UC San Diego alumna to join the team, along with her classmate Rich Wargo. As undergraduate film students, the pair worked at the campus Media Center alongside its technical director, Sherman George. When George was tasked with building the fledgling station years later, he called his former student workers back to help with the heavy lifting. “The amount of sweat equity in that station in the first six months was unbelievable,” George said.

Today, Burnstan manages the station, while Wargo produces its science programming. They’re joined by three more longtime alumni staffers, among others, who help create more than 150 original programs each year, ranging from documentaries and concerts to lectures and interviews, and have taken home dozens of local and national awards.

When UC San Diego Chancellor Richard Atkinson became UC president, he took with him the notion that the UCSD-TV model could work for the entire UC system. That opportunity arose on Christmas Eve 1999, when the UCSD-TV crew got the call that their station, which had since been made available on cable throughout San Diego, would soon become home to the University of California’s new satellite television channel, UCTV. That is, if they could manage to get it operable by New Year’s Eve. They did, initially with UC San Diego-produced programming, eventually expanding to include content from every UC campus.

UCTV’s quickly expanding archive of reputable content was sought out by technology giants Google and Apple, who were looking for quality programming to populate their YouTube and iTunes platforms. UCTV has since become one of YouTube’s most watched educational channels, with more than 100,000 subscribers across three different channels. In 2012, it became the first and only university awarded a YouTube original channel, UCTV Prime, an honor that also came with funding to create a year’s worth of high-quality, web-friendly content. UCTV has also seen an astounding response — more than 10 million downloads each month — to its audio and video podcasts delivered through Apple’s iTunes U.

UCTV has now embarked on yet another new venture, partnering with campus departments to help them transform their expert knowledge into mini media empires of their own. It began late last year with UC San Diego Extension’s Career Channel, which shares tips and trends on employment and careers through video, blogs and podcasts. This month UCTV launched both the Brain Channel, a resource for the latest on brain research from UC San Diego’s Department of Neurosciences, and the Library Channel, which offers a window into the activities and treasures of the UC San Diego library.

Back when she was just exploring the possibility of a UC San Diego-run TV channel, Walshok recalled a lunch she had at the UC San Diego Faculty Club with Brian Lamb, founder of the gavel-to-gavel public affairs cable channel C-SPAN. He gave her a bit of memorable advice. “ ‘Dare to be dull’ is what he told me,” Walshok said.

But there’s nothing dull about breaking new ground — whether it’s as a research university or a TV station. “I would describe our first 20 years as ‘dare to be different,’ ” Walshok said. “And that’s what everybody at UCSD does — pushing the frontiers.”

Alison Gang, formerly U-T San Diego’s film critic, was UCSD-TV communications director for 10 years. She’s now a writer in San Francisco.